Trust and Travel Advertising
Still not in Tennessee: The Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, Alaska.
Photo: University of California, Berkeley
As someone who spent her formative years living through all the good (hiking, skiing, glaciers) and bad (rain, cold, isolation) that Alaska has to offer, my blood boiled a bit when I read that Tennessee's tourism experts got caught using a photo of the Alaska Range in a Tennessee ad campaign.
The print ad, which appears in Outside and Travel + Leisure, shows a cyclist in the mountains and states, "You don't just visit Tennessee. You experience it. Engage it. Challenge it. And, at any point on our more than 1,800 miles of bike trails, love it." An Anchorage biker caught the gaffe: The photo originally appeared in a National Geographic article about -- you guessed it -- Alaska!
This is the third in a string of travel-advertising gaffes that Jaunted has noted this year:
As Jaunted reported in January, Royal Nepal Airlines used an image of Peru's Machu Picchu in its advertising campaign. (Oops!) Then in February Jaunted informed us that Tourism New Zealand caught fire for digitally blending a photo of two kayakers with one of dolphins swimming. The image is not misleading, the New Zealand Tourism folks argued, because it reflects "something that happens every day in our country." The wits over at Jaunted countered that they "would kind of like to poll Kiwi kayakers and see just how often a family of dolphins joins them."
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The ad that bothers me right now is the Discovery Channel "Club 1080". You can win a trip to a destination, and when they feature Anguilla, they show a waterfall and lush green surroundings. I think they confused that footage with Costa Rica, as the Anguilla I have visited multiple times is arid and no waterfalls that I could find - they do have a few cliffs, so maybe during a heavy rain. It is a quiet island with wonderful beaches and friendly people, but not really a lush tropical paradise as portrayed on the commercial.
Posted by: lorib | April 03, 2007 at 07:45 AM
The dangers of Photoshop are many. I think there was an old addage to believe only what you see, but I don't think that's true in this 21st century world, where it's so easy to blend the fake into something that looks so real.
Posted by: tracker1312 | April 09, 2007 at 11:12 AM